A Woman's Work Is Never Really What You Think It Is
by TheWomenKnow
Summary: Irene Adler was very good at giving men or women what they liked. Sherlock liked nothing more than winning. But what if matters did not transpire the way Sherlock really thought they did? What if Irene worked for Mycroft all along? And what if she was still working for Mycroft to this very day?
1. Chapter 1

You've been very thorough… I wish our lot were half as good as you." ~ Mycroft Holmes to Irene Adler, "A Scandal in Belgravia"

July 2012

It did not particularly surprise a certain Julianne Grey –Parker (formerly known as Irene Adler) to find Mycroft Holmes seated at her dining room table, reading a copy of the New York Times. She had gone out for a quick run around Hyde Park and returned to find the man known in intelligence circles as the personification of the British Government looking quite comfortable in her Sydney apartment, with a cup of tea he'd obviously made himself. 'Well, it was only a matter of time', she thought, as she removed her sweatshirt and took the seat across from him.

"Sydney? I would have thought Hong Kong or Dubai." he remarked, folding up his newspaper to look at her. "I suppose Australia is as good as place as any for a woman who likes horses and punting as much as you do."

Irene shrugged. "It suits my purposes. Busy, but not overly so. Besides, my Arabic is questionable and my Cantonese is subpar. But you already knew that." She reached across the table to pour herself a glass of water from the jug she had laid out earlier before she commenced her run. "Can I offer you anything else with your tea? I haven't done any shopping but I can run outside to get you something."

"No thank you." he replied. He deliberated for a few moments before speaking. "You are a perceptive woman Miss Adler, I presume that you know why I came to see you today." he finally said.

"In light of recent events, I can only assume it has something to do with your brother's demise and/or Jim Moriarty blowing his brains out on top of a hospital in London. In which case, I have nothing to offer you except my most sincere condolences for the former and congratulations for the latter." she replied.

"And how are you liking Sydney, Mrs. Grey-Parker? I can see you've settled in."" he said, noting the sparseness of the apartment and the wedding ring on her finger. "Divorcee or widow?"

"Widow. Less questions," she replied, setting her glass down on the table. "As far as the people of Sydney know, I train and deal with horses that my recently deceased husband's insurance policy purchased. That's it."

"This profession seems to suit you. I trust that the accommodations are to your liking? This isn't exactly Belgravia but it is a nice neighborhood. But we can arrange for something better," he said.

Irene was noncommittal. "This is standard issue for diplomatic staff. Far less ostentatious, more my taste. Besides, haven't you heard? My native country is in a recession." Mycroft gave a wry grin. "But you didn't come all the way here to talk about my decorator or economics. How is Sherlock?" She had hoped, in one way or another, that Sherlock had survived the fall and that Mycroft must have planned an out for his brother but she wasn't able to ascertain anything else from Neilson when she called him that morning from her satellite phone. "Let the Brits clean up their mess," he had said irritatedly and he hung up before she was able to press for more details. Neilson never did get over the whole "out the window" incident in Baker Street.

Mycroft gave her an appraising look. "Am I to hazard a guess that the affection you felt for my brother was not entirely feigned?" She did not respond.

"Never mind, Sherlock is none of your concern right now, we have more pressing issues." He reached underneath the table for some files in his briefcase, which he held out to her across the table. Irene stiffened.

"Moriarty is dead, the mission is finished. There is no more Operation Spider." she said, crossing her arms. She refused to take the files.

After seven years of living and breathing Operation Spider – the multiagency operation designed to dismantle James Moriarty's organization – Irene couldn't bear the thought of resuming work on that assignment again. She'd given almost everything for love of country and even though she always wanted to fight for the greater good, lately she wasn't sure what the greater good was anymore. She didn't even know if she was the same person, or if there was anything left of the young woman Mycroft had first met in Oxford all those years ago.

Mycroft looked at her with some distaste, almost as if she was a petulant child throwing a tantrum.

"Miss Adler, I don't understand. When you agreed to accept this mission, I thought you were committed to seeing it through." He placed the files on the table and steepled his hands under his chin. "Perhaps I overestimated your resilience or your professionalism.", he sniffed.

Irene was stung, but she tried her best not to show it. She composed herself for a few minutes before she formulated her answer.

"Sir, I don't see why my continued involvement is necessary. Nielson assured me that I would be transferred to Langley once they were certain that all of the compromised agents had been identified. It was agreed that I would keep a low profile until everything was sorted out."

A full week after she parted ways with Sherlock in Amsterdam, Irene called in her handler and met him in Prague. After a torturous debriefing session that lasted all of 72 hours with the agency's psychiatric experts, Irene expected that she would be repatriated to the United States to assume another post. She was surprised when Nielson handed her a dossier and told her that she was going to be assigned a nondescript name and identity in a safe country, until further notice – hence, Julianne Grey-Parker, the American widow in Sydney. It was a significant deviation from protocol and one she didn't pay much attention to until the older Holmes brother reentered her life. Suddenly, Irene started to piece together the reasons for her reassignment.

"Mister Holmes, am I in Sydney because of an anomaly in my psychiatric evaluation?" She asked, although she already knew the answer.

Mycroft remained silent. Irene had heard of double agents being retired prematurely due to the unwitting risks they posed to themselves and to their governments, but she had never expected that it would happen to her. Her entire record had been full of commendations for her work and she was circumspect in every aspect of her career. Women in her line of work were never taken seriously and she did not want to give her superiors the impression that she was anything but perfectly competent.

She rose from the table. "Since the day I took this job, I have done everything you and my superiors have asked of me." she said, her disappointment radiating from every pore.

Mycroft remained seated. "Agent Adler, you were missing for a full week after Karachi. The account you provided of your time after my dear brother came to your rescue was full of inconsistencies. We are aware of what you are capable of because we trained you. Given your… relationship with the late James Moriarty, we cannot take the risk that you alerted other members of his network of the other steps we have taken."

Irene had observed Mycroft Homes well enough to know when he was lying. This wasn't about Jim at all, it was about Sherlock. She sighed. "With all due respect sir, I think we both know that is not the real reason. I was always fully supervised when I was with the target and you yourself debriefed me after each meeting." If she was going to be let go, she might as well tell the truth. "The real reason is that you are afraid of what I might have told Sherlock. That I told him about our arrangement and the real reason why he and I met." She had always suspected that Mycroft's distrust of her began when she deviated from the script he had carefully authored, and now she finally had her confirmation.

She was not meant to contact James Moriarty for at least another year before she was sent a code red message that indicated she needed to call him immediately, kinky princesses be damned. Professional sex work with monarchs and those in the upper reaches of government was her cover, but it was also M15's way of ensuring that enterprising prostitutes did not have access to any sensitive information. If Britain took anything out of the cold war, it was to ensure that the perversions and sexual deviancies of its most high-profile targets remained in-house. Mycroft had strategically placed her in that profession in order to build a convincing pretext as to why she would require Moriarty's service. The mission began to operate on an expedited timeline after her phone call with Moriarty and she suspected that higher powers were starting to become uncomfortable with the sway she held over her clients. In hindsight, however, Irene realized it was because of her nascent relationship with Sherlock.

Sherlock's involvement was meant to be incidental but after she had relayed the details of their first meeting to Moriarty, he had rubbed his hands with demonic glee and insisted that she do everything in her power to seduce and destroy him. When Irene had relayed Moriarty's strategy to Mycroft, he simply nodded his assent. Originally, it was planned that Irene would simply use her position as a purveyor of secrets to give Moriarty false information. His fixation on Sherlock, however, meant that drastic alterations had to be made. As the months progressed and the new plan took shape, Irene could not help but feel sorry for Sherlock that his own older brother was tacitly permitting the emotional devastation designed for him by his deranged mortal enemy. Despite herself and despite everything she had seen in her line of work, she found herself sympathizing with Sherlock – the only truly innocent person in the whole drama who never deserved the hand she dealt.

Everything proceeded accordingly until the night of the Bond Air debacle. The passcode to her phone had been set up so that it would automatically yield its contents on the fourth try, at a preprogrammed time and date. It did not particularly matter what code Sherlock entered, the idea was that he would conclusively gain access to her phone and therefore solve the mystery, ending his seeming preoccupation with her. She had been instructed to go through her paces and give the impression that she had been thoroughly bested. What Mycroft had failed to take into account was the growing mutual attraction that she and Sherlock shared and the surprisingly romantic bent of Sherlock's deductions. Sherlock's evident pain almost prompted an honest admission on that fateful evening– one that did not go unnoticed by her superiors. She remembered walking out of Mycroft's dining room that night in a fitful state, unable to remain in the presence of someone who could callously order an agent to break his own brother's heart. It was the first time she sincerely questioned the morality of what she did for a living and it sparked her ambivalence towards her former life – ambivalence, she assumed, that made itself evident during her psychiatric evaluation in Prague.

Irene snapped out of her reverie and refocused on Mycroft. Who was looking at her as if he was aware of every thought that had just gone through her head. Bastard.

"I can assure you Miss Adler, I am well aware that you did not tell my brother about the true nature of your profession or you wouldn't be alive today." Irene felt a chill up her spine as he smiled coldly at her.

He rose and started for the door, leaving the files on the table.

"If you are still so intent on retiring to an office desk somewhere in Virginia, so be it. I'll see what I can arrange. But there are still many loose ends in Operation Spider that only you can attend to. Irrespective of how you feel about myself or my actions, I know I can trust you to do the right thing." Mycroft took his coat from the rack and he left her apartment without another word. He knew that within hours of his departure, Irene Adler would have made all the necessary arrangements for her next assignment, leaving no trace of Julianne Grey-Parker.


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter 2

October 2012

Berlin

It was almost midnight and Irene was freezing to death, waiting by a payphone in a gas station. Before leaving her apartment in Sydney, Mycroft had left her a plane ticket and a new set of identification papers, along with the address of a flat in Mitte. Her new cover was that of an aspiring photojournalist (Vivian Katz) who had recently moved to Berlin to further her career. Ever since she boarded the plane in Australia, she had no direct contact with either Mycroft or Neilsen except for written instructions that she was to report to Der Spiegel for work within two days of her arrival. Her dramatis personae was that of a dilettante who had made a quarter-life career change from NGO work in Africa and Asia to serious journalism, with a focus on foreign aid and development policy. 'Child's play', Irene thought as she burned her briefing documents in her new flat's stove. She reported to the chief of the foreign desk, a young American named Godfrey Norton who didn't even give her a second glance when she walked in on her first day. "Just e-mail me," he'd said and that was that. In a previous life she would have been miffed at the lack of attention paid to her, but in her current state, flying under the radar served her well. There was a distinct lack of La Perla and Louboutins in the wardrobe of the flat she inhabited; all her clothing was distinctly cheap, generic and far less sexy than anything she had worn for her previous covers. There was an Occupy Wall Street T-shirt in the closet of her new apartment, bearing the slogan "Better Blow Jobs Than No Jobs" with a picture of Bill Clinton. She knew it was Mycroft's idea of a perverse joke, but she also understood its implications – Vivian Katz was part of the 99%. Taking the hint, she resumed wearing her glasses and bought more dowdy cardigans.

For almost four months, she devoted herself to writing articles on increased foreign investment in Africa and the development/conservation tradeoff. It wasn't exactly very far from her line of interest and she would have performed a similar line function as an analyst in Virginia anyway, except for the fact that 95% of what she wrote she knew to be fiction. It was much better than training thoroughbreds but she still had no idea what she was meant to do in Berlin. She made some friends at the office but she found that she couldn't take them seriously while she was sober. Given what she'd seen, she found their valiant efforts to expose the injustices they uncovered largely futile – it was better to simply accept the stark realities of the world than to be crushed by naïve expectations. She wondered if Mycroft had placed her here indefinitely as punishment until she received an anonymous message scrawled on the receipt that came with her morning coffee. "23:54, Total, Chausseetr" it read. She knew better than to look at the person who handed it to her or to question the provenance of the message – she would recognize Nielson's shitty handwriting anywhere.

At exactly 11:54, the phone began to ring and Irene picked it up. It was an automated message advertising the unlimited data plan of a local telecommunications company, all for the low monthly price of 64.10 Euro. Irene listened for the duration of the message and hung up once it was completed. That was all she needed to hear. Swearing softly to herself, she went inside the convenience store to purchase a bottle of vodka before heading home. She needed it for what was to come.

Room 641A was a "black room" operated by the NSA in AT&T's San Francisco headquarters. Its primary purpose was to intercept any sensitive information that was transmitted by the telecommunications network, until it gained significant media attention and was finally shut down by a lawsuit in 2006. Irene had only been with the agency for a few years when the scandal broke out, but it had cause such a significant upheaval within the intelligence community that all the intelligence-gathering departments had to restructure and retrain assets. For those with codeword clearance, the numbers 641 indicated a serious breach, advising all operatives to be careful.

Irene was expecting this. She knew that the problem of big data was going to rear its ugly head again eventually – there were far too many moving parts in the system and far too many "black rooms" that were poorly managed. One of the lasting legacies of the Patriot Act was that the rapidly expanding scope of data management, analytics and data collection required hiring of external contractors who posed significant security risks – all it took, really, was one strategically placed disgruntled employee and the system would fall apart. She was able to manage the leaks to some degree as The Woman but without access to her handlers and with very limited information in her new post, she did not know how to anticipate the provenance of the leak. Obviously, someone in her newspaper had the information and intended to publish it, but there were no other specifics given as to who would publish the data. For the first time in a long time, Irene felt like she was flying blind.

Based on what Irene knew of Berlin and its notoriety as a spying hub, she understood why Mycroft and Nielson had posted her there: any e-mail, electronic activity or even any phone call she placed could easily be picked up by the SCS listening station in the American Embassy, or one of the German "black rooms" set up under the Five Eyes agreement. Irene could not even type a search term on Google without raising all kinds of red flags. Anonymyzing software was also a nonstarter – she'd slept with enough security contractors to know exactly how to exploit TOR or other readily accessible systems.

She knew that her superiors had anticipated that the leak would end up at Der Spiegel, but she didn't receive any other clues to help her with her task. She managed to install a very basic undetectable keylogger on the main computer system, but she need to wait until the program was able to mine the data she needed. Frustrated and impatient, she threw herself more deeply into her work, writing increasingly caustic pieces on the illusion of overseas development assistance as altruism while also targeting the corrupt political leaders who had chosen to waste foreign aid money on her extremely expensive services.

After a week, Irene still had nothing to show for her data mining efforts except some tawdry e-mails between two coworkers who were having an affair. However, she had also written a very well-received article on the practices of illegal arms traders in Somalia that had prompted a stream of laudatory letters to the editor. Irene usually skimmed through her emails from readers with minimal attention so she was quite surprised to receive a forwarded message from her Godfrey with the subject line "SEE ME ON MONDAY."

Curious to see what was so alarming about the email forwarded to her, she opened the message that Norton had sent. It read:

"Dear Ms. Katz,

Thank you for that very informative and insightful article. It is quite rare to find such an incise critique of the systemic failure that contributes to political instability in Somalia, especially a popular broadsheet. However, I felt that there were a few points that I wanted to raise and I hope you are able to indulge me. I am curious as to why you believe that the only way to effectively control the flow of arms into the country involves key personnel shifts in the Somali Armed Forces, rather an overhaul of the entire system. Based on all the available information, I believe that Al-Shabaab has established such a firm foothold in the armed forces to the point that they are ineffective against such an entrenched terrorist organization; ergo, the existence of AMISOM. The idea of integrating Puntland forces into the Somalian National Army is a great one, except that President Farole does not seem amenable to the idea of unification at all. Your article operates on a very different set of assumptions from what we've been led to believe about the political climate and I was hoping to understand why you've put forth such a seemingly improbable argument.

Sincerely,

H. Sigerson, The National Geographic Society"

Irene was alarmed. The only reason why she knew about the extent of Al-Shabaab's operations in Somalia is because they were the terrorist group that captured her. Ostensibly she had been under surveillance the whole time she had been held, but neither the CIA or MI6 intervened when she had been forced to—

No. She wasn't thinking about that.

Drawing on her training, Irene used every ounce of her willpower to prepare for her meeting with her editor. She started by running an internet search on this Sigerson character and then her heart started racing again for all the wrong reasons.


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter 3

_February 2, 2012_

_Amsterdam_

_Two hours after rescuing her in Karachi, Sherlock had booked them on a KLM flight from Lahore to Amsterdam, business class. She hadn't said a word to him after they had killed her attackers, except to say thank you when he handed her a bag with a brand new set of jeans, a black sweater and some sneakers in the getaway car. Sherlock seemed to sense that something was wrong and had given her a wide berth. They'd taken a suite in a 4-star hotel not far from the train station under the aliases Mr. and Mrs. Langtry. It had been two days since Sherlock had saved her and she had not left their hotel room since they checked in, choosing to hide under the blanket to sleep in the king-sized bed for long hours. Sherlock took the couch. _

_On the third day, Irene woke to the noise of Sherlock typing on his laptop at light speed. He noticed that she was awake even without looking up but he waited for her to speak. She noted that the television was on Al-Jazeera, even if it was muted. _

_"Won't John notice you're missing?" she asked, finally sitting up from the bed. She had not removed her attire from a few days ago and she realized that she was starting to stink. _

_Sherlock briefly paused and glanced at her. "John can wait." He returned his eyes to the computer screen and resumed his typing. "There are new clothes in the bathroom, in case you want to get changed." Irene nodded and got up to take a shower. She was surprised to see that he had bought her some nice, classic pieces from Joseph – much like the clothing she favored in London when she wasn't working. She changed into a comfortable pair of black twill pants and a cashmere sweater. _

_Upon exiting the bathroom, she found a room service table with breakfast on it while Sherlock remained glued to his computer on the couch. Irene was touched. Without giving it much thought, she walked to Sherlock and gave him a grateful kiss on the cheek. When his surprised eyes met hers, Irene said the only thing she could think of. "Thank you." His tension seemed to give way at that and he gave her a brief nod of acknowledgement. She took a seat at the table to begin eating and a few minutes later, he pulled up a chair to sit across from her. _

_ "Lilian Langtry? I would have thought that you would be more subtle than that." she said, indicating her alias. "Well, you do share a taste for monarchs." he said dryly. He was being unbearably nice to her and he kept looking at her as if she was fragile. It irritated her to no end. They ate the rest of the meal in silence. _

_After breakfast, she poured herself a cup of coffee from the pot that came with their meal. "When will you be returning to London?" she said, with feigned lightness. "I don't want to keep you from anything and I think I can take it from here." She attempted to take the sugar which was on Sherlock's side of the table but he stopped her by grabbing her wrist. Her sweater sleeve had slipped enough to show the bruises and Sherlock fixated on them before looking up at her with an unreadable expression on his face. Immediately, she snatched her arm away. There was an awkward silence before Sherlock spoke again. _

_"Irene…" he said, seemingly at a loss for words. "Irene, we need to get you to a hospital." Irene pretended that he hadn't said anything and carried on her end of the conversation. "I have some contacts in Prague so I think I can leave by tonight. You really don't have to keep me company, I'm perfectly capable of taking care of myself." Sherlock shook his head. "No… Not in this state you're not. You're obviously experiencing some type of post-traumatic stress disorder. You've been in a fugue state for almost three entire days." _

_Without saying another word, Irene stood up and moved towards the door to leave. Sherlock had anticipated that and he had quickly positioned himself between her and the door. _

_"Sherlock, let me go." she said, determined to get the hell out of there. _

_"No." His voice was resolute, firm. "I'm not leaving Amsterdam until you go to a hospital." _

_Irene implored him silently but Sherlock remained where he was. He spoke again, calmly._

_"Irene, you need to find out if you're pregnant or if you've contracted anything –" he didn't get to finish because she had slapped him soundly across the face. _

_"You left me to the wolves and you didn't even care if I lived or died. So please spare me this false solicitousness. If you really had a conscience, you would have let me die in Pakistan." Sherlock looked into her eyes and he could tell that she was dead serious. He didn't try to stop her again when she reached for the door and left. _

_As it turned out, Irene couldn't even go very far because she had stormed out of the room without any shoes on. She was forced to sulk in the coffee shop in the hotel lobby with a bottle of wine, which is where Sherlock found her a few hours later. Giving her an apologetic smile, he dropped a shopping bag on her lap before taking the seat across from her. Irene took a look inside the bag and found a pair of black Manolo Blahnik pumps. _

_"You seem to have forgotten these, dear wife." he said._

_"I suppose you think you're so smart, hiding my shoes" she said "but this is a Lafitte 2003. And I charged it to your room." She was slightly drunk which is why she was in a more forgiving mood. She also neglected to mention that it was her third bottle. _

_Sherlock looked amused. "I think you mean our room. And in that case..." He gestured to the server who returned with another wine glass and he poured from the half-empty bottle. "Cheers, darling." he gave a sarcastic toast and tipped it back as Irene watched him with irritation. _

_After a few minutes of tense silence, Sherlock spoke again. "I'm sorry I didn't come to get you sooner. I wanted to find you but I couldn't." He looked distinctly uncomfortable and Irene knew he was alluding to Pakistan whilst simultaneously posing as a contrite husband who'd just had a spat with his wife. _

_Suppressing her anger, Irene nodded in acknowledgement of his apology. She knew that Sherlock really did try his best to find her and it was a miracle that he did in the first place. It wouldn't have been productive to dwell on the past anyway. _

_Changing the subject, she broached the topic of his return to London, coming at it from an oblique angle. "I suppose we should be going home soon? You probably have to go back to work. Your colleagues must be waiting for you." _

_"Not necessarily." he said, with a gleam in his eye. He reached into his coat and drew out a newspaper clipping which he promptly handed to her. "This is a business trip."_

_Irene quickly scanned the headline which was dated back to 2006, detailing the recovery of Edvard Munch's "The Scream". "I don't understand, you think there's going to be another theft?" she said quizzically. _

_Sherlock shook his head. "No, I think the painting's already been stolen." He reached into his pocket for something, which he held out in his hand to her. It was a small platinum wedding band that matched the ring on his left hand. "What do you say, Mrs. Langtry? Shall we take a trip to the museum?" _

_Irene told herself she that it was the excitement of an impending case that made her heart skip a beat. She sculled the remaining wine in her glass as she took the ring from his outstretched hand. "Of course, dear husband of mine." she answered somewhat sarcastically. _

_"Good. Put your ridiculous shoes on and let's go." he rose, offering her his arm. Irene knew he was trying to offer her a welcome distraction. He'd known about what had happened to her in Karachi and he also knew that the only thing that would make her feel whole again was the thrill of the chase. Prague could wait another day, she told herself and she beamed at her fake husband. _


	4. Chapter 4

Chapter 4

October 2012

Berlin

The Berlin offices of Der Spiegel consisted of its Der Spiegel Online bureau, which had a skeleton staff of about ten people. Most of the content came from freelancers so Vivian Katz was one of only three staff writers in Berlin. Technically, she was a contributor for the online portal of the magazine but on occasion, her work made it into the print version.

After their first meeting, Irene had few chances to see Godfrey Norton in his office. He was always traveling back and forth between Hamburg and Berlin so he insisted that she only submit her work to him electronically. He never offered her much feedback apart from the usual grammatical corrections. So she didn't really get a good look at him until she was summoned to see him, ostensibly to talk about her story on Somalia.

The first thing she noticed was that he was tall – almost as tall as Sherlock. He had dark brown hair, blue eyes and classically good-looking features. Perhaps in another life, this was the type of man that Irene would have found attractive but after all her experience, she was able to sum him up thusly: WASP. Late thirties. Educated in an Ivy. Graduate school in Europe. Born and raised in New York. Ambidextrous. Left a promising career in International Law to pursue some kind of pipe dream in journalism. Trust funded. Well-traveled. Liked rail thin blondes who reminded him of his mother. Single. Occasional cocaine user. Amateur tennis player. Vanilla sexual preferences. There was nothing really there to pique her interest, she'd seen so many like him before.

She plastered a fake smile on her face as she knocked on his door. "You wanted to see me?" she said, with what she hoped was enough bashfulness and deference that was appropriate for her cover.

He looked up from his desk and smiled. "Vivian, yes. Come in, come in." He stood up and ushered her inside. He gestured to the chair in front of his desk and returned to his seat once she had taken it.

"I was hoping to talk to you about this story from Somalia. Did you get my email?" he turned to look at her, twirling a pencil between his long fingers.

She smiled uncertainly. "Yes, but I'm not sure I understood it." She had googled Henry Sigerson and he was some sort of travel photographer who specialized in Tibet. She found copious photo credits of his work online but she could not find a single picture of the man himself, which was pretty alarming.

"Sigerson's an old friend of mine. He's done a lot of freelance work for me in the past. We use a lot of his photos even though he prefers that they remain uncredited. He does a lot of work in hot zones and he feels better if he remains anonymous." he explained, setting his pencil down on the table. "After we published your article, he gave me a call to ask if I could set up a meeting. He plans to go to Somalia within the year to do a story and he was hoping that you could talk to him. He was very impressed by your insights. Did you work out of the USAID office in Mogadishu?"

Something was off and Irene could sense it. He was nervous and he was quite obviously lying. He'd started tapping his finger anxiously on his leg and Irene knew from his body language that he didn't trust her. She had half a mind to call off the whole operation but she forced herself to remain calm.

"Yes, but mostly on the transitions initiatives and agricultural development – nothing too risky. I was only there for a few months." That was a little too close to the truth for comfort but Irene couldn't think of a good lie. Godfrey nodded, before asking another question. "Did you work with the peacekeeping forces who were there? You seem to know a lot about the military personalities involved."

Shit. One of those "personalities" actually arranged for her beheading almost nine months ago. She struggled to keep her composure. "No. To be honest, I was just repeating what I'd heard from one of the guys I dated. He was embassy personnel and he just liked talking to me, I guess. He told me about what he'd heard on the ground." She tried her best to sound as vapid as possible and she hoped that it was convincing. Some of the tension seemed to leave Godfrey's shoulders so it appeared he was satisfied with her answer.

"Thank you Vivian," he said. He rose from his chair and Irene took that as her cue to leave. "Sigerson still wants to meet you so keep Friday night open. Said he'll meet us for drinks in Kreutzberg." Irene nodded and left, relieved that she could finally leave his office. It was pretty clear that Godfrey Norton was hiding something.

Shaken by the encounter, Irene immediately proceeded to her desk in the bullpen to pick up her purse. She carried two phones: one standard iPhone for personal use and a second, government issued Blackberry. Every agent was given a six-digit code to enter into their secure phones if they needed to request an emergency extraction. In eight years of government service, Irene had never used that code even when she was on the verge of death or worse. She'd been in bad situations before but her threshold of tolerance got significantly lower after –

Feeling dizzy, Irene ran to the ladies' bathroom and started to throw up. After she emptied the contents of her stomach, she shut the toilet lit and sat down. She rested her head on the cool cubicle wall and took her Blackberry from her purse. 678349. The numbers were etched into her brain and it would have been so easy to just type them in. To end it.

But Irene had never aborted a mission –ever. She'd known others who had but she always prided herself on seeing things through to the end. With a renewed sense of resolve, she replaced the phone in her purse, washed her face in the sink and reapplied her makeup. _The Woman broke others, she'd never break._ She said it out loud, to her reflection in the mirror. Throughout the day, Irene kept repeating this mantra to herself, hoping she would finally believe it enough until it came true.


	5. Chapter 5

Chapter 5

_February 2, 2012_

_Irene missed her Louboutins – at least they were comfortable and she could always maintain her balance in them. As she attempted to keep pace with Sherlock's long strides, she found herself stumbling every few steps in her new perilously high Manolos. Of course she'd guessed correctly about his foot fetish which is why she'd worn nothing but heels when she first met him, but the man was simply stupid if he couldn't figure out that stilettos and cobblestone streets simply didn't mix in any way, shape or form._

_After the third time she almost tripped, Irene stopped and stood completely still. "Are the Langtrys happily married, or would it be perfectly alright for Lilian to take a taxi to meet her husband in the museum?" she asked, more than just a little annoyed. Sherlock, who looked to be deep in thought, snapped out of it and seemed chagrined. "Sorry, I'll walk slower." he held out his arm again and Irene took it. They resumed walking at a decidedly slower pace._

_"So, the Langtrys?" she prompted, wanting to know more about their covers. "Right. Paul –that's me—is an associate professor of art history at one of the lesser colleges." he reached into his pocket for a set of rimless eyeglasses to complete his transformation. He had styled his hair differently and worn a tweed blazer to give a convincing impression of a reclusive academic. "And Lilian?" she asked. "She's the alcoholic daughter of one of the chancellors. Decidedly promiscuous. Probably cheating on Paul." he said. "She's probably going to – ow!" It was Sherlock's turn to stop as he rubbed his calf in the area where Irene had kicked it. _

_"I can't believe you've based our cover identities on 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?'" she said, a little incredulously. "Well I'm sorry!" he exclaimed, more than a little pissed off that she'd kicked him. "It was playing on my flight to Lahore and I couldn't think of anything else on such short notice." they resumed walking but Sherlock had a slightly pronounced limp. "If it's any consolation, I think you're much more frightening than Martha." Irene smothered a smile. Truth be told, she was having fun for the first time in what felt like years. _

_"And by lesser colleges, I assume you're talking about the entirety of Cambridge, yes?" she had a feeling that he'd matriculated there and this was confirmed by the furrowed line of his brow. "Sorry, some of us do attend university to obtain a proper education in the sciences not to hobnob with the political elite," he sniffed. Ah, so he'd sussed out her own alma mater. Fair enough._

_They were both silent for the next few blocks, obviously trying to deduce which college the other attended._

_"It couldn't have been Trinity," she finally said. "If you went to Trinity most of your days would be spent in a lab." Sherlock snorted. "I do spend most of my days in a lab." "Yes but it would be a proper lab like CERN or DARPA, not a morgue. No, you would've gone somewhere else..." she thought about it for a moment until finally the answer came to her. "Ah, Kings'!" she said triumphantly. "The birthplace of unacknowledged genius." Sherlock gave her a slightly impressed look and she knew she had it. "You're going to go to prison, get chemically castrated but give it half a century, at least everyone will know you were right. Or conversely, someone will issue a fatwa on you. I'm thinking both." she laughed lightly and even Sherlock seemed amused._

_"Well?" she asked after a few minutes. "Aren't you going to ask me which college I came from?" Sherlock shook his head. "No need. I already know it's the same one as Mycroft." Before Irene could form a proper reply, Sherlock stopped in front of the Rijksmuseum. "We're here. Please try not to be so conspicuous, and remember that you are recently diseased." Irene rolled her eyes and squared her shoulders. "Of course darling," she said sweetly and Sherlock narrowed his eyes at her with suspicion before proceeding inside._


	6. Chapter 6

_Chapter 6_

_February 2, 2012_

_Amsterdam_

_Sherlock had fallen into another one of his trances where he didn't speak at all or give any sign that he was cognizant of what was happening in the outside world. They'd been in the museum for a good hour or so, walking past the Vermeers and the other utterly banal paintings that exemplified the Baroque period. Irene could sense that his mind was working a thousand miles a minute and she tried her best not to interrupt him. But after standing in front of Jan Asselijn's painting of a threatened swan for a good twenty minutes or so, she was starting to get restless._

_"It's a swan" she said, trying to rouse him from his reverie._

_Sherlock finally turned to look at her._

_"Yes." was all he said._

_After a few more minutes, she said. "It's a very big swan. But I'm not sure why we it deserves so much attention."_

_"This particular painting was meant to symbolize Dutch nationalism and some say –"_

_"—that the swan is mean to be Johan de Witt defending Holland against the enemy of the state which is the dog, yes. I know all of that but why have we been standing here for so long?"_

_"Sorry." Taking the hint, Sherlock disengaged himself from the painting and they resumed strolling through the museum at a leisurely pace. "I noticed that you haven't asked me what we are doing here." he said._

_"Obviously, we're here because you want to examine the other Vermeers on display for any anomalies. They already attempted to forge one last year and you were hoping to see if any of the other paintings in the collection were fakes." This was textbook stuff, really, and she felt insulted that he believed she couldn't figure out something so basic. "I think if we're going to stand here looking at paintings we're just going to be wasting our time. Forgers are skilled enough to elude even x-ray detection."_

_ Sherlock smiled. "But we aren't here to look at the paintings." He nodded in the direction of a young curator being interviewed by a journalist with a camera crew and suddenly things clicked into place. Sherlock hadn't been observing the art, he'd been tracking the progress of the film crew. "How's your Dutch?" he asked. "Better than yours" she replied as she pulled his arm to move them within earshot of the interview._

_From what she could hear, the young male curator was complaining about the bureaucracy of the museum and the inefficiency of its decade-long renovation project. Without being too specific, she knew that he was alluding to its contractors who had overcharged the Dutch government, leaving them very little money to expand their collection for new acquisitions. His speech grew especially impassioned when describing an incident where he had to prop up some priceless pieces to protect it them from leaks and Irene started to laugh until Sherlock pulled her away to lead her to the exit._

_Once they were safely outside, Sherlock led them to a café across the street and didn't speak again once they sat down and placed their orders. "So, what were you able to deduce?"_

_Irene was slightly uncomfortable with his piercing stare so she occupied herself with the task of folding her napkin into an origami swan. "The Rijksmuseum is full of desperately unhappy specialists who are fighting with government bureaucrats who won't give them funding. It wouldn't be very difficult to find someone here who would help forge a Vermeer." She was operating on the basic principle that any intelligence agent knew: the best way to penetrate the system was to find the disaffected and the marginalized to convert them to a new cause. _

_"Right." he replied. He typed a few search terms on his iPhone and he showed her the screen. "There has been abnormally high employee turnover in the curating staff of the museum, but absolutely none in the 17__th__ century paintings collection." Going over the search results, Irene noted the abundance of advertisements for curating positions in each collection and the dismally low pay. "So, given a dysfunctional environment, a leaky building and a botched renovation—"_

_" – why would anyone stay unless they were able to supplement their income some other way." Irene finished for him._

_"Exactly." Sherlock seemed pleased that she was able to follow his train of thought without the need for lengthy explanations._

_"So did you look into the curator already?" In response, he handed her his iPhone where he'd pulled up the biographical information of the three key people who maintained the 17__th__ century collection. Irene was a little impressed. "Wow. Oud Zuid on 70,000 euro a year? Someone is definitely living above their means." She was referring to the assistant head of the department and his decidedly ritzy address. She returned his phone when their coffees arrived. "Are we paying him a visit?" she asked. "Later, when it's darker." he replied._

_After a few minutes of companionable silence, Sherlock addressed her again. "So you speak Dutch." It wasn't really a question._

_Irene nodded. "French." She nodded again. "German." Again, another nod._

_"But you don't speak Urdu and your Arabic is poor."_

_"God giveth and god taketh away" she said noncommittally. "Here, a present." she handed him the swan she'd made out of the cloth napkin._

_"Don't try to change the subject. What were you doing in Pakistan?" She moved to leave but Sherlock had reached across the table to take her hand in a firm grip, effectively preventing her from doing so._

_"How did you find me?" she said, trying to redirect the line of questioning. She wasn't going to give anything away but she had a feeling he knew why she was there in the first place. _

_"I was able to install a cloning app on Neilson's phone, the day he broke into my apartment I monitored his incoming calls, his texts and his emails. There was no mention of you at all, until he sent out a message that said one of his HUMINT assets had been abducted in Mogadishu a few weeks ago by an irate arms dealer who was connected to Al-Shabaab. The hostage's description fitted yours. The messages indicated that your captors had taken you to Pakistan because they wanted to use you to identify Blackwater operatives in the area. I waited for them to give an extraction order but none ever came. When the State Department told Nielson to deny the second set of demands, I was already in Karachi." He paused to take a sip of his coffee and waited for his words to take effect._

_Irene already knew this – she knew the protocol for compromised agents in deep cover and how they were utterly and completely alone once they'd been identified. Still, she couldn't help but feel touched that he had gone out of his way to save her, even after all that had happened between them._

_"I'm sorry." she said, hoping to convey her regret. "I was just following orders." Sherlock squeezed her hand in understanding._

_"I know."_

_"You shouldn't tell Mycroft." she said, hoping to avoid any conflict between the two brothers over what had happened. "Irrespective of what you think, he was just trying to do what was right." At that, Sherlock withdrew his hand._

_"What my brother fails to understand in his insufferable arrogance is that there is a significant difference between what is right and what he thinks is right." he reached for his wallet and drew out some euro notes to pay for the bill. He stood up, indicating that she should follow him. "Come along now woman. If you're going to be breaking and entering, you won't be doing it in those shoes." Irene rolled her eyes but she followed him anyway. _


	7. Chapter 7

_Chapter 7_

_September 11, 2001_

_Irene was just about to leave for her early morning class on Advanced Semantics when her cellphone rang. It was her sister, Elise, calling from California. "Go home. Go home now. Mom needs you." Elise had hung up before Irene could press her for any answers or protest that she needed to prepare for her upcoming paper. She felt an immense sense of foreboding, like a cold fist had clenched around her heart. Thankfully, Princeton University wasn't very far from Bergen County where Irene's parents lived so she immediately grabbed her car keys and left her dorm room._

_As a senior, Irene was one of the lucky few who was able to snag a single room in Forbes College which was situated far far away from the rest of the other, nosier dorms. She'd had her fair share of nosy roommates and she was perfectly fine with her solitary existence – the less distractions, the better. Between herself and her blonde, vivacious sister, she was always the bookish and retiring one so it wasn't as if she needed other people around all the time. As she was leaving the building, she noticed several students clustered in groups, many of them crying. The dread that Irene felt began to build until she couldn't stand it anymore and asked one of the girls from her Calculus study group about what was wrong. The girl looked up at her with tear-filled brown eyes._

_"They've attacked us. They've hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon."_

_Suddenly, Irene understood why Elise had called her with such urgency. Dad. Phil. She immediately took out her mobile phone to call her father but the automated voice on the other end indicated that the number was unreachable. She tried calling her brother and got the same response. Trying her best to remain calm, she ran straight to her car with a single thought: make it home._

* * *

_The Adlers lived in a small borough in New Jersey called Saddle River, which was fairly close to New York. It was an affluent town with lots of sprawling, expansive mini-mansions. Compared to their neighbors, the Adlers were thoroughly upper-middle class and lived far more modest, discreet lifestyles. Colonel Edward Adler had recently bought a new home for the family to celebrate his retirement and he'd been especially proud of his youngest daughter when she chose Princeton over Harvard to be closer to her parents. He occasionally traveled to Arlington for consulting work with the Department of Defense, but he was mostly content to keep his days busy with his rose garden and his bushes. Phil, the eldest child, had recently completed his MBA in Columbia and had gotten a high-paying job working for Morgan Stanley. Elise, the middle child, had gotten married to a software engineer and had moved to Palo Alto to be with her husband. Irene had tried to call her again before she drove to Saddle River but Elise was not answering her phone._

_Pulling up on the driveway, Irene noticed two black sedans parked beside her mother's car. She hastily made her way to the door and rang the doorbell frantically. When her Uncle Frank opened the door, she could tell by his expression that all her worst fears were true, even before he began speaking._

* * *

_Irene, her mother and her father's brother Frank sat on the couch, watching the news in a shellshocked, catatonic state. Several of her father's army colleagues had come over to pay their respects but she felt too numb to even acknowledge their existence. Ben Hudson, her father's second-in-command during the Gulf War, had also come to comfort the family upon hearing the news but there was simply nothing anyone could say to alleviate the pain or the injustice of it all._

_The attacks were especially devastating for Caroline Adler, Irene's mother, because she had pushed for her son to pursue a career in the private sector, away from the violence that was always threatening at the edges of her life with her husband. That she would lose both her husband and her son when life was supposed to be ok – when Ed had finally retired – was a crushing blow to her sanity._

_In the days after, it was left to Irene to hold the fort and make sure life returned to a sense of normalcy. Her mother had lapsed into a fugue state and Elise couldn't travel to New Jersey because all the flights had been halted with the heightened threat of subsequent attacks. Irene had to make the funeral arrangements, to greet the mourners and all the other requirements for the living to make peace with their losses. She went through the motions mechanically, by rote, and she tried her best to survive on a day-to-day basis by keeping busy._

* * *

_When Elise was finally able to arrange for a flight to New Jersey to attend to matters and Irene was able to return to Princeton, she found that she couldn't even muster up the energy to get out of bed for her classes. For four days, she laid in bed in her dorm room, not eating, not sleeping, refusing to answer her phone or acknowledge the outside world. She had put up a strong front for her mother and her sister but deep down inside, she couldn't exist in a world where things like this happened – where things like this were allowed to happen._

_Then on the morning of the fifth day, she had an epiphany. Scrolling through the contacts on her phone, she found the number she was looking for and she dialed it immediately. Her father had devoted his life to being the change that he wanted to see in the world and he did it without complaint—at the very least, she owed him the same. When Colonel Ben Hudson finally answered the phone, Irene had only one question for him: "How do I enlist?" _


	8. Chapter 8

_Chapter 8_

_Sometime in 2011_

_A man walked into a bakery in London's Fulham Road with the hurried air of someone who was late for an appointment. He was an old-fashioned type who seemed distinctly out of place in the bustling establishment, full of young Chelsea mothers and their babies in outrageously expensive strollers or hipsters in their smoking slippers who were getting their morning fill to stave off hangovers from the night before. He was just about to leave when he noticed a hand waving him over, gesturing for him to take a seat opposite its owner._

_Mycroft was puzzled – he'd received a call indicating that Jim Moriarty wanted a meeting in Gail's that morning. He hadn't expected to find a young, pretty blonde woman with a baby in tow as Moriarty's envoy. He took a seat opposite her, noting she had a Bluetooth headset attached to her ear._

_"I met your pet" she said, without much preamble._

_Mycroft was confused. "Which pet?"_

_"Your protégé. The Yank." The baby started to fuss and she gave Mycroft an apologetic look as she tried to soothe it with a bottle. It was clear that she was simply repeating what she was hearing from the headpiece, without really understanding what it was she was supposed to say. Unlike Moriarty's other mouthpieces, however, this one didn't look like she was being coerced or strapped with explosives. Still, Mycroft could never be too sure. He tapped out a quick message to Anthea while the woman was otherwise preoccupied. She responded a few seconds later with a brief biography of the blonde – a part time nanny who answered an ad on Craiglist to make some extra money. _

_When she faced Mycroft again after attending to the infant, he was much more composed._

_"I'm sorry, I don't understand what you're talking about."_

_"Mr. Holmes, there's no point in playing coy. No need for us to pretend. I'm actually quite impressed with this one – this woman Irene. She not like the others that come from that farm in Virginia or that shithole near Portsmouth. You've gotten better at this. Was it your idea to make her a dominatrix for her nonofficial cover? That's a nice touch. Kinky."_

_Mycroft was nonplussed. "I think that you're delusional. If you did your research, you would know that Ms. Adler never spent any time in Monckton or Camp Peary. She's just a whore. A clever one, but a whore nonetheless." He wasn't in the mood for euphemism or any more of Moriarty's mind games._

_"Alright then. Just a clever whore. But if I find out that you've been lying, I won't hesitate to kill her." The blonde looked alarmed at what she was told to say – obviously, she was going to think twice about answering similar ads in the future for an extra hundred quid. She grew even more alarmed when Mycroft leaned in. "Then kill her. It really makes no difference to me."_

_"Ah, but what would little brother dear have to say about that?"_

_Mycroft stood up to leave. "Nothing. He'd probably help you kill her himself, given the chance." He walked out of the café just as the SIS agents swarmed in to close it down to take everybody in for questioning. _


	9. Chapter 9

Chapter 9

October 2012

Berlin

On Thursday afternoon, Irene received an e-mail from Godfrey that she was supposed to meet him and his mysterious friend in a small bar called Das Hotel at 10 o'clock, Friday night. Das Hotel was one of those Kreuzberg places popular with hipsters and Berlin's self-proclaimed intelligentsia. On the day itself, Irene spent a good two hours in front of the mirror trying to decide what to wear. Finally, just as the clock read 9:30, she threw on a vintage dress she'd found on one of her shopping trips and a pair of knee-high boots before leaving the flat in a state of fashionable dishabille. As The Woman, she had a very precise and tailored look, reminiscent of Hitchcock heroines—she was not particularly fond of the sartorial choices that were popular in present-day Berlin but she was supposed to be undercover and Ms. Katz couldn't have showed in up head-to-toe McQueen without raising some questions. She tried very hard not to think about the last mission she was sent on or the fact that her handlers had almost certainly sent her to her death—for better or worse, she'd come out of Mogadishu alive and the US Government with its allies would just have to make the best of it. Deciding against walking in the cold, she hailed a cab and gave the driver some instructions in fluent German. Settling into the backseat, her thoughts wandered back to her erstwhile boss and why Mycroft had sent her to Berlin to keep an eye on him.

After logging on to her A-Space and Intellipedia accounts on a secure connection the day before, Irene had found out a little bit more about the mysterious Mister Norton and what he was doing in Berlin. He was the youngest son of a conservative Associate Justice of the Supreme Court in the United States but he had fallen out with his father for some reason or another a few years after completing his law degree in Harvard. Unlike his other siblings who had assumed prestigious posts in the US Government (older brother, Solicitor General of the Department of Labour, older sister, Senior White House counsel, younger sister, New York Attorney General), Godfrey had seemingly rebelled against the career path that had been laid out for him since birth and remained estranged from the rest of his family. He had changed his surname to that of his late mother's and left a lucrative partner-track position in a prestigious New York firm to work for the ACLU. After a few years in Boston, he'd moved to London to take up Political Science at the LSE before switching to the Politics and Communication programme. He'd moved to Berlin to write his thesis on the German Federal election and ended up joining the board of Reporters Without Borders where he had met the current editor-in-chief of Der Spiegel. By all objective accounts, Norton was an upright, idealistic man and Irene couldn't understand how he had ended up on the radar of MI6 or the CIA.

She had tried to run a similar search for Henrich Sigerson but that proved ultimately futile: the only known record was a birth certificate from Oslo dated August 25, 1954. The file indicated that his parents were deceased and there were no other living relatives listed in the database. She supposed that the only way to sate her curiosity was to meet this mysterious man.

A few minutes after she had alighted and paid the cabbie, Irene found herself walking into a crowded, busy pub. She quickly scanned the room and found Godfrey already seated at a small table with a tall, heavyset gentleman beside him. Upon meeting her eyes, Godfrey gave her a big smile and waved her over – Irene suppressed the innate shiver she felt as she returned his smile and walked over to their table. A quick glance at their empty glasses and their flushed faces indicated that they'd already put away a couple of pints and she was able to relax somewhat; in her experience, people who wanted to kill you weren't going to do it while drinking liberal amounts of Pilsner.

"Vivian!" Godfrey declared, somewhat tipsily. "I'm so glad you could join us." Both men had stood up on her arrival and she was able to take a closer look at the mysterious Mister Sigerson. "I want you to meet my good friend Henri. Henri, this is Vivian Katz, one of my new star reporters." Henrich Sigerson was a tall, middle-aged man who had the appearance of someone who was somewhat unkempt in his daily life, dressed as he was in a brown corduroy blazer and a black t-shirt. For some reason, Sigerson reminded her of an eccentric Oxford maths professor who had taken to wearing Hawaiian shirts during his lectures—the same deliberate, iconoclastic air of an intellectual who simply did not give a shit. Irene smiled at him and Sigerson took her hand to give it a kiss. "Enchante" he said and Godfrey rolled his eyes. "She's here to talk about Africa, not for you to hit on." Henri smiled at her. "I can't see why we can't do both. Please, take a seat." Irene noted that his Norwegian accent was almost nonexistent, giving the impression of someone who'd spent most of his life abroad. She graciously took the seat that was offered to her– she felt silly that she'd almost called off the mission when for all intents and purposes, this meeting wasn't anything other than what it appeared to be. She was starting to wonder if she'd imagined Norton's nervousness from the week before when he interrupted her train of thought.

"Do you want anything to drink?" he asked, standing up to go to the bar.

"A glass of rose would be lovely. Thank you." He nodded and he left to place her order, leaving her alone with his companion.

Sigerson started clearing the table of the numerous empty glasses and he gave her an apologetic smile. "I'm sorry, we got started without you. I hadn't seen Godfrey in a while. We had a lot to catch up on." His elbow had knocked off two empty shot glasses and before they could reach the floor, Irene had caught them both reflexively in mid-air. She had hoped that Sigerson hadn't noticed but a quick glance across the table indicated that he had seen her. His countenance changed immediately and he regarded her with an altogether different look – one that reminded her for some reason of Sherlock and Mycroft. He leaned back in his chair and regarded her with a clinical, assessing gaze as she replaced the glasses on the table.

"Nice reflexes." he said in perfectly enunciated Oxbridge English without the faintest trace of a Norwegian accent. He seemed a lot more sober now and gone was the collegial, jovial air of before. "Did they teach you that in Somalia?" Irene chanced a quick look at Godfrey, who was caught up in the long queue at the bar. Sigerson noted the direction of her gaze and looked back at her. "Katja, the bartender, has a crush on him. It'll be at least five minutes before he returns to the table." he said dismissively. "It's just you and me for now, Ms. Katz. Now, would you mind telling me what the hell you're doing in Berlin?"

Irene had been in similar situations before and the important thing was to always, always keep calm. Putting on a broad smile, she did her best to feign nervous confusion. "I'm sorry but I don't know what you're talking about. You asked me here so I'm assuming that you know something I don't." In her mind, she calculated that it would take three seconds to reach into her purse to dial her extraction code. She was just about to make up a plausible excuse to make a phone call when Sigerson interrupted her thoughts again.

"You shouldn't write about Africa anymore. Too many people know about the female hostage taken in Mogadishu earlier this year and you'd pretty much confirmed it in a magazine article no less." He spoke in a softer tone of voice now, almost as if he was… concerned? Irene noticed he was looking at her with something akin to understanding. "If you're going to write, don't write about what happened to you. You're probably angry about what transpired but hoping that someone discovers you're still alive and puts an end to your misery is simply not how it's done. Despite everything you've been taught, you can have a life after all of this. Now nod and tell me you understand what I'm trying to tell you." Something about his delivery indicated that he was intimately familiar with the circumstances of her life – like he'd been through it before. Irene's curiosity was piqued. Maybe it was instinct but she decided against dialing her extraction code. Something about Henrich Sigerson made her want to trust him.

"What about you?" she asked, hoping that he would be more forthcoming with details. "How did you end up in Tibet?" He gave a weary sigh and was silent for a few seconds, almost as if he was waging an internal debate with himself. Finally, he drew out his wallet to show her a picture of a beautiful Asian woman and a young boy who had distinctly Eurasian features. "That's my wife. She's from Lhasa. That's our son." He returned his wallet to his pocket. "There are still some things worth fighting for in this world, Miss Adler. I think you really need to ask yourself if the life you've made is really the life you want to lead." Before she could respond, Irene noticed that Sigerson's demeanor had changed again into the tipsy, lecherous Norwegian, signaling that Godfrey was about to return to the table with her wine and another round of drinks for all of them. It took her less than a second to resume her fake persona and to smile at Godfrey. "There you are! Henri was telling me so much about you…"


	10. Chapter 10

Chapter 10

October 2012

Berlin

_BEEP, BEEP, BEEP_

Irene reached across her nightstand to turn off the alarm on her iPhone when her hand collided with a solid wall of flesh. Alarmed, she sat up and realized that she wasn't alone and had fallen asleep beside someone – Godfrey Norton. Confused as to why her editor was in her bed, she tried to recall the events of the previous night and she remembered that Godfrey had insisted on accompanying her home because he didn't want her to take a taxi alone in her inebriated state. They'd parted ways with Sigerson after dancing in a club called Schlawinchen at around four am. Henri had charmed quite a few beauties into dancing with him but neither of them could keep up with his seemingly inexhaustible energy. They were both too drunk to do anything amorous and she recalled that she had asked him to sleep in her bed because the couch was uncomfortable and it was far too late to call another cab. Both were still fully dressed in the previous day's clothes, reeking of alcohol and smoke. She observed Godfrey's sleeping face and she couldn't help but notice that he really was handsome, even in drunken repose. She was just about to reach for her phone when Godfrey's voice interrupted her –

"For God's sake, kill it. Whatever it is, kill it." It was pretty clear from his irate tone that he was just as hungover as she was. She tried to locate her phone in its usual spot on the nightstand and upon finding it missing, she remembered that it was still in her handbag. She got out of bed to locate her purse and found it on the floor. After rummaging for a few seconds to find the offending item, she turned the alarm off but noted that she had two unread text messages in her inbox. Upon seeing an unfamiliar number, she opened the messages to find that they were requests for a lunch meeting later that day in KaDeWe's dining hall, signed "HS." Sigerson. She looked at the bed and noticed that Godfrey had gone back to sleep, with a pillow over his head. Sighing, she grabbed some underwear, a t-shirt and a pair of jeans from her closet before retreating to the bathroom to take a nice, long shower.

Upon exiting the bathroom, Irene noticed that Godfrey had made himself comfortable on her couch while watching BBC news on her television. Seeing her, he raised the steaming mug of coffee he had in his hand and gestured to the pot in the small kitchen. "Sorry, I needed the caffeine." he said somewhat apologetically. "I'm unbearable without it in the mornings." Irene smiled indulgently at him. "That's ok. I need to wake up as well." She poured herself a mug and joined him on the couch, at a loss for words. How exactly did one address her boss after a drunken night together? Damned if she knew what the protocol for these things was.

After an awkward pause, she finally addressed him. "Thanks for keeping me company last night. I had a great time." She wasn't lying, she really did enjoy herself. After her brief conversation with Sigerson, neither had broached the subject again and he had referred to her exclusively as Vivian for the rest of the night. Irene was happy to have people to talk to and she didn't realize the extent of her loneliness until last night when she realized she really appreciated Sigerson and Norton's company.

Norton blushed. "Thanks. I'm sorry about all of this although in hindsight I should have expected it from Henri. He's ridiculous and old age has only made him worse." He winced, obviously still feeling the effects of too much alcohol. "I don't suppose it would be too much of an imposition to ask for some aspirin?"

"Not at all." Irene immediately stood up to go to the kitchen and rummage for the Alka-Seltzer she always kept around. She found some in the cupboard and she poured two glasses of water, dissolving the tablets in them. She returned to her seat on the couch and handed a fizzing glass to Godfrey. "Cheers." They clinked their glasses together in a mock toast and watched the news in companionable silence.

"You have… interesting friends" she said, after a few minutes. She was wildly curious as to why Sigerson and Norton would ever be acquainted but it was clear from last night that they had a deep bond that had spanned many years. At her remark, Godfrey snorted. "That's putting it mildly." he said, chuckling to himself. He finished his drink before speaking again. "I met Henri a long time ago when I was in Boston but he wasn't a photographer then. He was a civil servant of some sort." He paused, obviously trying to choose his words carefully. "When we met again in London, he'd given it up and moved to Ladakh after a drastic career change. I tried asking him about why he'd left government work but he didn't want to talk about it." Irene did some quick internal calculations – that meant that Sigerson and Norton had met while the latter was working for the ACLU in the early aughts.

"To be honest, I was quite surprised that he'd taken a liking to you." Godfrey was looking at her now and Irene had to remind herself that she couldn't indulge her feelings while on a mission – it had already cost her dearly before and she couldn't afford to get involved with another potential target. "Oh?" she asked, almost too casually. "Why is that?" Godfrey grinned before lowering his eyes. "The man's paranoid. He's convinced that everyone is a spook." He chuckled again, seemingly oblivious to Irene's nervousness. "He was pretty convinced that you were one until he met you last night." He laughed again. "Honestly, if he still thinks you're a spy, he needs to come see your apartment." He gestured towards her flat, which was strewn with all manner of books, documents and different articles of clothing in every direction. Irene had been meaning to spend her weekend cleaning up, having been used to having a maid at her disposal for many years but she hadn't gotten around to it because she wasn't expecting company. The flat was littered with the garments she'd discarded when she tried to choose an outfit for the previous night.

Still laughing, Godfrey plucked a stocking from underneath the coffee table and passed it to Irene. "Vivian, I can really see this coming in handy when you interrogate someone for state secrets." Embarrassed, Irene snatched the errant piece of clothing from his hand and gave him a glare. "Don't you have somewhere else to be on a Saturday morning apart from rummaging through women's underwear?"

"Sorry" he said apologetically, trying to stifle additional laughter. "Although I must admit, there are worse ways to spend a Saturday than rummaging through your underthings." He'd spoken without thinking and he immediately flushed red once he realized the implication of his words. Despite herself, Irene was having fun but she knew she had more errands to attend to that morning or she was going to be late for her appointment. Feeling awkward because of what he'd inadvertently revealed, Godfrey stood up to leave. He reached for his coat which was hanging on a peg by the door.

"Thanks again for everything. I'll be in Hamburg next week but Henri said he'd be in touch about his story on Somalia." His tone was a little more formal now, far more professional. "I gave him your number so he said he'd get in touch before he left Berlin."

"I'll keep you posted." Irene replied. Their eyes met again before Godfrey looked away nervously. "See you soon" he said brusquely and he left without another word.

For a few minutes after she had closed the door, Irene allowed herself to feel a small thrill at what had transpired between herself and Godfrey Norton that morning. After she recognized the danger signs for what they were, she carefully locked whatever she felt away into another compartment as she prepared herself for her meeting with Henri Sigerson later on that day.


	11. Chapter 11

Chapter 11

October 2012

Berlin

After Godfrey had left that morning, Irene decided to spend some time cleaning up her apartment. She hadn't noticed that it was positively filthy and that two of her recently purchased plants had died of neglect. She was somewhat grateful that her slovenliness had elevated her to a state beyond suspicion in Norton's eyes but she also realized a profound truth that she had been hiding from herself for some time: she had been depressed. All agents were trained to evaluate themselves for signs of psychological trauma but she had neglected to perform an internal inventory of her emotions in the immediate aftermath of what had transpired. To be fair, she didn't have much to be happy about and the knowledge that her life was disposable in the eyes of her superiors did nothing to alleviate her mental state in the months after Pakistan. Still, she was starting to feel like her old self again and she suspected that it had something to do with Godfrey Norton.

Once she had finished cleaning up, she looked at the clock and noticed that she still had an hour to kill before meeting Sigerson. She took out her secure laptop and her Blackberry, debating if she should call Nielson or Mycroft to tell them about what had transpired the night before. The agencies had remained incommunicado while she was in Berlin except for a brief message or two asking for status updates – once, awkwardly enough, through an ATM machine. Irene took that as a sign that she should keep communications at a minimum at this stage of the mission. She'd never had this experience before – of being left unsupervised on an operation—and she wondered if it was because she was now a liability instead of an asset, a loose end that simply refused to resolve itself. Instinct told her that neither Mycroft nor Nielson would take too kindly to hearing about Henrich Sigerson and a small part of her wondered if telling them about Henri would result in her reassignment to another fatal mission. They distrusted her already and were probably looking for the faintest pretext to dispose of her, officially. Without any way to reach Sherlock, she didn't think that she could survive another operation like Mogadishu. After much deliberation, she put away her laptop and her Blackberry, resolving to keep her mouth shut until she knew more. Putting on some practical trainers, she grabbed her coat and decided to take advantage of the sunny weather by commuting to KaDeWe.

As she ascended the escalators in the glittery, upscale department store, Irene couldn't help but remember the first time she'd ever been to KaDeWe's top floor. For a good part of the eighties, Ed Adler had been stationed with his family in the military base in Berlin. Her brother Phil was sent to Choate but Elise and Irene were deemed too young for boarding school by their mother, and attended the Department of Defense Dependents' School in West Berlin for a few formative years. Irene hated the school, thanks in no small part to the fact that she was placed in the fifth grade even though she was only six years old. The children bullied her relentlessly and Elise had done nothing to help her sister, resenting the fact that they were in the same class even though Irene was significantly younger. She tried her best to keep her troubles private but every night, she would cry herself to sleep, dreading going to school the next day. She couldn't help it, she was just _different_. Even in her own family, she was nothing like Phil or Elise who had taken after their mother; she was small, shy, and decidedly bookish. She did such a good job of keeping her secret that it wasn't until she brought home a report card riddled with failing grades that her parents noticed something was wrong.

Upon being admonished by a stern Caroline, Irene finally burst into tears. It was then that Ed took a good look at his daughter and finally realized he'd been remiss in his fatherly duties.

"Irene, go to your room. Get dressed. We're going out." At that, Caroline turned to her husband reproachfully. "It's your fault, you indulge her too much. She's not normal." But something in her husband's expression made her hold her tongue and she nodded her assent when Irene meekly asked for her permission to leave the room.

That afternoon, Ed had taken Irene to KaDeWe's famous food hall for the first time. She had been to the department store before, but only to accompany her mother to the boring floors that housed women's apparel. She'd never seen so much chocolate and food laid out in such a sumptuous setting, just for her perusal. She'd stopped at the Leysieffer display, marveling at the truffles piled high beside the glass case. Noting her interest, Ed had gestured to the shopgirl and told her in German that he wanted one of each. After she'd wrapped the overflowing parcel, he handed it over to his daughter who didn't want to accept it.

"Mama will get mad. She doesn't allow me to eat chocolate. She said I'll get cavities." Irene said, not wanting to earn more of her mother's ire. Ed had stooped down until he was eye-to-eye with his littlest daughter. "Then maybe just this once, Mama isn't right." Irene hugged him tightly then, trying to convey how much she loved her father for trying to understand her. He returned her embrace and squeezed her reassuringly before he stood up. "Come along now, let's see what other junk I can feed you."

After their day in KaDeWe, Irene was assigned a special tutor and she was told that she could study from home, at her own pace. She remembered feeling immensely grateful to her dad for being perceptive enough to help her even when she didn't know how to ask for help. Irene tried very hard not to think of her father after he had died and she pushed the unwanted memories away, trying to clear her head for her upcoming meeting.

Upon entering KaDeWe's spacious and luxurious food hall for the first time in over two and half decades, Irene scanned the room for Henri Sigerson. She finally located him at a table and she noticed that he had at least four trays, each piled high with different types of cuisine. He was in the middle of eviscerating a piece of lobster so he didn't notice when she slid into the chair across from him.

"Hungry?" she said, with a raised eyebrow to indicate that she found the conspicuous display of gluttony somewhat distasteful. Noting her disapproval, Henri simply chose to ignore it.

"Don't judge me until you've lived on boiled Yak for years at a time. But women like you tend to make an enemy of food anyway." He abandoned the lobster and started in on a big piece of seared tuna. Irene watched him with a mixture of fascination and revulsion, noting that he was still in the same clothes he wore the day before. "I take it from the absence of SWAT teams and SIS agents that you haven't told your bosses about me." He said this very casually, like he was discussing the weather.

Adopting the same casual tone, Irene responded. "To be honest, I haven't decided yet. I'm not even sure that there's anything here that poses a threat to international security." She made an offhand gesture, as if to indicate that someone like him couldn't possibly pose a threat.

"Thank you, by the way."

"For what?" He'd stopped eating long enough to look at her with some interest.

"For not telling Godfrey. I really appreciate that."

Putting his fork down, Sigerson took a sip of water and regarded her with the same clinical gaze that she had seen the night before. "You like him." He deduced with a taunting smile. "Seriously, if you're going to be any good at this game you've got to stop falling for your marks."

Suppressing her annoyance, Irene tried to steer the conversation in a more productive direction. "Did you call me here just to taunt me about my poor taste in men? To be honest, I expected a little more than that." Sensing that he'd hit a sore spot, Sigerson took out his iPhone and handed it to her. "Fine, since you're so impatient. There, read it."

Scanning the screen quickly, Irene noted that the browser had landed on a Guardian article about 9 British citizens who posted bail for a notorious hacktivist-cum-whistleblower. She quickly returned the phone to Sigerson, who had paused his voracious consumption of food to intently observe every nuance of her expression.

"So?" She still didn't understand what that case had to do with her current mission. Henri gave a small huff of frustration. "For God's sake woman, civil liberties are being trampled on, lives are being lost and all you can say is 'So?' Is it any wonder that the world is in this state." He was definitely irate and he was taking it out on the hapless Cornish hen in front of him.

"It's irresponsible. What he did is irresponsible. You want to romanticize this travesty but I know for a fact that people have died because of this asshole." She felt herself start to get angrier. "You might think that what he did was heroic but the Taliban used that website to execute tribal elders in Afghanistan. You can't possibly think there's any merit in it." Suddenly, Irene had an epiphany. "It was you wasn't it? You had something to do with this." She started to panic, knowing that she had to call Nielson or Mycroft NOW before she was implicated any further. This was treason. Before she could talk herself out of it, she took out her Blackberry.

Sigerson looked at her very calmly. "I wouldn't do that if I were you." He seemed to know exactly what her intentions were. Irene looked him square in the eye as she dialed the number. "Then thank god you're not me." She hit send and waited, finally for the world to end.


	12. Chapter 12

Chapter 12

October 2012

Irene had never used her emergency extraction code before so she didn't really know what would happen after she dialed it. She half-expected a host of armed agents to swarm into the food hall to pull her out or even a self-destruct code that would result in the phone exploding, destroying everything in its vicinity. What she hadn't expected was that Sigerson would carry on eating as if nothing had happened and she would be stuck with the phone in her hand, with a confused expression on her face.

"Er…" she said, after a minute had lapsed.

"Oh for God's sake." Sigerson exclaimed in obvious annoyance. Before she knew what was happening, he had plucked the phone out of her hand and was addressing the person on the other end.

"She's fine, the asset is fine." Upon hearing the other person's response, Sigerson rolled his eyes in annoyance. "What do you mean who is this? Nielson, it's me you insufferable twat. She's just had a panic attack." After a few seconds, he responded again with more irritation. "Well of course I'm alive, you idiot! What do you mean prove it? Fine." He rattled off a sixteen digit alphanumeric identification code. "Holmes, Sherinford. Retired from active duty but called in again to sort out another one of your stupid messes. Satisfied? Now tell that idiot Mycroft to get his arse in Berlin. He doesn't have a clue what's about to hit him." He hung up the phone and tossed it to her before attacking the tuna again. "Now can you please let me eat in peace before you have another fit of pique." Stunned into silence, Irene merely nodded her assent as he resumed eating.

Whatever she was expecting when she dialed her emergency code, she definitely wasn't expecting_ that_.


End file.
